The education system is not designed to turn out thoughtful individualists, it is there to get us to work. When we come home exhausted from the inanities of our jobs we can relax in front of the inanities of the TV screen. This pattern, punctuated by birth, death and marriage and a new car, is offered to us as real life.

Children who are born into a tired world as batteries of new energy are plugged into the system as soon as possible and gradually drained away … Those who have kept their spirit find it hard to nourish it and between the ages of twenty and thirty, many are successfully emptied of all resistance.

I do not think it an exaggeration to say that most of the energy of most of the people is being diverted into a system which destroys them

Money is no antidote. If the imaginative life is to be renewed it needs its own coin.

Imagination and Reality // Jeannette Winterson